We were absolutely delighted a little over a week ago to receive images of this beautiful worked-up sprig detail from one of our patterns from Sue Jones. Sue (who blogs over at Tortoise Loft ) completed this fine shadow work in filament silk (from Devere Yarns) on some silk habotai fabric. The colours and delicate finish really bring this pattern to life and have been much admired by the project’s followers.

Sue learned of the Stitch Off from Rachel Wright of Virtuosew Adventures, which has to be one of my favourite blog titles ever. Rachel has also embarked on her Stitch Off project in the past week: a caramel-coloured pashmina. Rachel has written a really interesting post on her blog about her first experiments on this unamenable fabric, which we hope you’ll all pop over and visit here. It’s a shame she is going to unpick them to complete the finished article, but at least she has photos of her work so far, as well as earning ‘a newfound respect for any lady of the period who embroidered her muslin dresses, or her silk gauzes’.

It’s so lovely to hear and see how you are all getting on and, in particular, to learn what you are finding out about the challenges of this kind of work. If we haven’t yet posted pictures of your current projects we promise we will soon. But until then, we have another way to repay your efforts.

You may have seen some hints on our social media pages that we have an announcement to make about the Stitch Off. Well here it is.

The Lady’s Magazine project has strong connections with Chawton House Library, a centre for the study of women’s writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries housed in the Elizabethan manor house that belonged to Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen Knight. I was lucky enough to have my first full-time academic job at Chawton and still feel very much linked to the Library and all the great work it supports; Jenny has been a Chawton House Library Visiting Fellow on two occasions in the past few years; and the two of us and Koenraad were delighted to be invited to talk about our project at Chawton in May of last year.

Full details of the ‘Emma at 200’ exhibition can be found here. As you’ll see, it really is going to be something else. The riches of the Chawton collection are being mined to illuminate the world and reception of Austen’s novel in Britain and Europe, and several other items are being loaned from other major research collections in the UK and beyond.

An entire room of the exhibition is going to be devoted to the topic of female accomplishments – music, painting and, of course, needlework – which readers of the novel will know loom large in this, as in all, Austen’s novels. And that’s where we come in.

I will be loaning my copy of the Lady’s Magazine that has the Stitch Off patterns in it and will be making copies available to exhibition goers. But what Chawton House Library would really like (really, really like) are modern-day worked-up examples of the patterns for visitors to see and handle.

So, if you have been waiting for an excuse to start the Stitch Off, maybe this is it. If you would like your working-ups of any of our patterns featured in the exhibition, all you need to do is get in touch via the comments box below or on Twitter or Facebook. We would love to have you involved. You would need to send your work to us by the middle of March (the exhibition runs from 21 March to 25 September 2016) and must not mind your work being handled as it will be displayed on a table in the exhibition room rather than behind glass. We will endeavour to return all work to you after the exhibition closes in September.

Completed (or partially completed) work for display at the exhibition should be sent to:

As Jennie reminded us earlier this month, we have recently entered the last quarter of the term allotted to our research project. Most of my time currently goes to the attribution of the countless anonymous, initialled and pseudonymous items in the Lady’s Magazine, and the ascription of appropriated content. The overwhelming majority of the over 14000 indexed items were published without a (complete) legal name for their authors, and every day I discover more contributions presented as original work that are in fact tacit appropriations from other periodicals, or extracts from books. To make sure that I do not miss too many of the latter I merge my mind fully with my computer, like some bookish Keanu Reeves, and check each item by means of a hypnotic but productive procedure. A while ago it struck me how different my daily routine must be from that of scholars employed on exactly the same task not twenty years ago. So, where do the differences lie?

I usually work as follows. I consult the Lady’s Magazine in its digitized format hosted by Adam Matthew Digital, take two samples from different paragraphs in the item under scrutiny, and query those in three online databases: Google Books, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale), Eighteenth Century Journals (Adam Matthew Digital). On occasion I give British Periodicals (ProQuest) a go, but I have found this more useful for nineteenth-century publications, and for news items I sometimes give British Newspapers 1600-1950 (Gale) and British Newspaper Archive (British Library) a whirl too. In short, I usually have a very cluttered desktop, but there is no alternative if I want to do a decent job. Different databases store different information, and it is definitely worthwhile checking a few. It is common knowledge that magazine staff writers in this period were a crafty bunch, but the Lady’s Magazine’s amateur content pirates can be surprisingly resourceful too, and identifying appropriated items is not always easy because the original sources often were altered ever so slightly. You learn after a while to avoid sampling the opening or closing paragraphs (often added to provide a new context for the appropriation), as well as passages with names or locations in them. In March 1773, for instance, an anonymous contributor to the magazine thinks nothing of making some very minor alterations in an extract from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Memoir of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (1770; translation 1772), and presenting the result as “A Persian Anecdote” to fit the trend for oriental tales. The original is not “Persian” or otherwise “oriental” in the least; it is in fact a utopian early science fiction narrative.

You cannot trust eighteenth-century periodicals, bless ‘em, and I am sure that despite my vigilance I still miss many appropriations. When I discover that an item is an extract from a book, I will check WorldCat, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or Orlando (Cambridge U. P.) to find out the exact title and year of first publication, and jot those down too. After I feel satisfied that I have checked the item to the best of my abilities, I enter my findings in our annotated index, and go on to the next item. So doing, I learn more about the magazine every day, but like my close colleagues I sometimes get obsessed with individual items. Tracking down the minutest detail can take up hours, and often I never do obtain the information that I was looking for. Jennie, Jenny and I have of course pointed out many times that ours is a tricky task, because data on periodical authorship in the eighteenth century is scarce and patchy at best, and for the ascription of appropriated content we rely to a great extent on textual corpora that have been digitized for cross-reference.

But, hold on a moment. While that last statement will likely not raise any eyebrows among my fellow children of the digital age, the old school of authorship studies will perhaps be appalled by my lack of stamina, by my not spelunking into the dustiest recesses of record offices and research libraries all over the United Kingdom until I have learned exactly what I wanted to know. Although I hope that I am not an armchair antiquary, and the scope of our corpus would make in-depth study of each single item impossible anyway, I make no excuses and do realize that I am spoiled. Of course, academic scholarship has changed over the past few decades too, or so I am told by colleagues of the generation preceding mine, who witnessed these changes first-hand. How many scholars today could find the time to research and write a vast bibliographic tome like Robert Mayo’s The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (1962)? Nevertheless, this book is still used today as a reference work throughout the field of eighteenth-century studies. We at least turn to it regularly. Besides its sheer size, what makes Mayo’s study even more admirable is that he produced it before digital resources became available. The first of these appeared only halfway through the 1970s, and until the breakthrough of the internet over twenty years later, they were hardly easy to use or update.

Despite Mayo’s greater fame, there is one pioneering pre-digital scholar whose work in attribution and ascription in periodicals has been even more valuable to me. Even in this computerized age, you will find me about once a week in the British Library, ensconced in a little fort that is constructed largely of books by Prof. Edward William Pitcher (formerly at the University of Alberta). I expect that most of our readers, who have at least dabbled in eighteenth-century magazines themselves, will be familiar with Pitcher’s work. In 1999 he was honoured with a well-deserved special issue of American Notes & Queries (ANQ), a journal which has long published his articles, in which a short laudation by Prof. Arthur Sherbo – no less – goes a long way to explain the importance of Pitcher’s contributions to the field.[1] He has published many indexes, articles and notes on the authorship and provenance of periodical pieces in all genres, which have for a large part been collected in the ongoing series “Studies of British and American Magazines”, issued since 2000 by the Edwin Mellen Press. Impressively, 32 of the 33 book-length volumes published in this series so far are by Pitcher (incl. two co-authored titles). The only other scholar to furnish a single-authored book, incidentally, is Prof. Emily de Montluzin, whose splendid index of the poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine was an inspiration for our own index.

Joseph Addison, by Sir Godfrey Kneller Bt. (circa 1703-1712)

Pitcher delivers useful emendations to the work of others (among which Mayo), new indexes of important magazines of the eighteenth century from Britain and (colonial and independent) America such as the Lady’s Magazine’s more conservative competitor the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798-1832), and notes on individual magazine writers or issues in attribution. Because of its centrality in the late-eighteenth century periodical market, the Lady’s Magazine pops up regularly, and some titles in the series have proven especially useful to us. For instance, Pitcher’s The Magazine Sources for Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments… by Mr. Addison (London 1794-97) (2004) is an index of the thousands of items compiled in this long-forgotten miscellany (spoiler alert: the reference to “Mr. Addison” is false advertising). Not only does he document several pieces that were taken from the Lady’s Magazine, Pitcher also ascribes several items taken from other sources that in between found their way into the Lady’s Magazine as well. Producing just one such elaborate index would maybe not be very exceptional, but Pitcher has done at least a dozen. His two-volume index of the British Magazine January 1760-December 1767 (2000), to give another example, has likewise shown me the way to several articles extracted without acknowledgement in the Lady’s Magazine, as have several other similar titles in the series. A third particular Pitcher favourite of mine is An Anatomy of Reprintings and Plagiarisms (2000), because its preface and its several chapters that are each dedicated to representative case studies together provide one of the clearest introductions to the murky territory of appropriation in the eighteenth-century press.

I find the tenacity and manifest expertise behind each of Pitcher’s studies, from his most elaborate indexes of leading periodicals to his shortest notes on the obscure hacks that helped make them, nothing short of humbling. Whereas I can rely on internet databases to show me the way towards sources and to provide me with instant access to them, the previous generation had to do much more work themselves. My practical advantages include that I do not need to travel great distances between libraries whose holdings are now but two mouse clicks away from each other, or to peer for hours at microfilms to find out details that can know be had in seconds. I also imagine that the old school required a more extensive working knowledge of their subject than I need to get by; a firmer understanding of eighteenth-century culture as a web of myriads of interacting agents that each leave textual traces behind, coupled with an amazing knowledge of what these diverse traces entailed, where they can be found, and how they should be interpreted.

When our index goes online in a few months (gulp), you will find amongst our thousands of research notes many references to Pitcher’s works. This will be a fitting tribute to a scholar whose life’s work is to ensure that people get due credit for their efforts.

Now we are comfortably into the new year, we thought it was high time that we gave a brief update on the Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off. For the uninitiated, where have you been? But if you have managed not to hear us shout about what we’re doing on social media, I should explain that we have made available a number of embroidery patterns from a bound copy of the magazine from 1796 that I recently acquired in the hopes that some of you (lots of you!) might try to make them up and tell or show us what you enjoyed and learned in the process. Photos of the patterns (along with their measurements) can be found here.

The first thing to say is thank you! Thank you for your interest, your enthusiasm and your expertise. Lots of people have sent us emails and tweets about wanting to take part in the Stitch Off and what you might do for it, although we know that many of you have other projects you need to finish up first. That fact, along with the holiday season and all the busy-ness that entails, has led some of you to ask us if we have an end date in mind for the Stitch Off. At the moment, we don’t. We want everyone who wants to take part to do whenever it fits in with their lives.

Some of you, though, have already got stuck in and we wanted to share some of your images and experiences so far.

The first person to contact us with their impressions of the patterns was embroiderer and lecturer Alison Larkin, whose wonderful blog on historical embroidery will no doubt be known to many people reading this post. As Alison explains in this post, she is currently working with Sophie Forgan on an exhibition for the Captain Cook Memorial Museum on Sailors’ Wives and Sweethearts for which she is producing a replica map sampler and a piece of partially completed embroidery. When she suggested that the latter might use the winter shawl pattern we’d published, we were overjoyed. Alison’s comments on the unprofessional and untidy drawing of the pattern really intrigue us, and we’d be delighted if others of you who are working with different patterns (or others from different points in the magazine’s history) think this is a one-off or characteristic of their published patterns across its run and what conclusions we might draw from this. (I still am in the dark about where the patterns were produced and whether for the magazine, specifically, or not). Alison’s work on the Stitch-Off project so far (one of her many projects) has been to clean up the pattern and the results look terrific. We can’t wait until she has the time to begin stitching.

The first person to complete a pattern was Jenny DiPlacidi, one third of our project team. Jenny went a little off piste for her contribution to the Stitch Off and worked on a pattern from a copy of a bound issue of the magazine she bought last year. Using material and threads she already had, Jenny returned to stitching after a long time away to produce this replica of one of three watch cases published in the magazine for 1775. She plans on attempting another design very soon. You can read about Jenny’s thoughts on the process in the blog post she wrote on the subject here.

The last example we want to share for now is by Lucie Whitmore, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting briefly and hearing speak at a multi-disciplinary conference on clothing from the medieval period to the 1960s in May last year entitled Disseminating Dress. Lucie, who has a first degree in textile design (print and embroidery) is currently completing a PhD on women’s dress in World War I at the University of Glasgow. But she jumped at the chance of transporting her research interests more than a hundred years before that to work on this design for a gown or apron. Lucie worked on some muslin she had to hand and used silks she had lying around.

The results, we’re sure you’ll agree, look really lovely, although working white on white must be tiring on the eyes in the low light of the darkest and rainiest British winter I can remember.

But never fear. As Dr Sally Tuckett (also from the University of Glasgow) reminded us, where there’s whisky, there’s a way.

We have lots of other experiments in the pipeline after reading your queries about the magazine’s song sheets and recipes, but we hope Sally will excuse us if this isn’t one of them!

If you are taking part in the Stitch Off, we’d love to hear from you. To get in touch, you can reply in the comments box below, tweet us via @ladysmagproject or email via our new project Facebook page. If you’re not, then please do still like our new Facebook page where we will be keeping you up to date with the project in more than 140 characters at a time.

The serial fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1848) is often novel-length, anonymous and absorbing. I began writing this blog about one of the serials that I found particularly engrossing, Memoirs of a Young Lady, intending to point out its originality and praise its writing style and plot. But (perhaps inevitably) as I began researching the serial for the blog in an attempt to uncover any information beyond its publication dates in the magazine, I made a very interesting discovery.

Published from April 1783 through November 1786, the serial entertained readers for over 3.5 years. The anonymous novel, never signed in any of its over 40 installments, has – like most of the fiction in the periodical – remained largely unknown and unstudied.

The novel follows the heroine, Lucretia Bertie, as she navigates her way through the constant persecutions of the primary villain, lord Belton, and his wife, her former friend Sophia. Sophia’s jealousy of Lucretia, inflamed by her husband’s infatuation with the heroine, drives her to devise increasingly vicious plots against her. One of these plots involves hiring her former footman, William, to attempt to force Lucretia into a marriage with him. The footman, posing as a wealthy gentleman, attempts (and fails) to woo Lucretia before threatening her with rape if she refuses to marry him. Sophia justifies her plan in a letter stating that she has paid for a public house for William to run as she does not want to ruin Lucretia’s ‘honour’, but wants to humble her by being a publican’s wife and hopes this will restore her husband’s affection. Lucretia is able to escape the lodgings where she is held captive and flees to safety before further machinations ensue.

The adventures sound, in a simple recitation of the plot points, far-fetched and formulaic. Yet the author ensures this is not the case; such scenes are carefully located within a much longer narrative that frequently focuses on the heroine’s everyday struggles to find gainful employment (at times in a milliner’s shop, at other times as a companion) and to resist her love for a married man, Beaumont (lord Sedley). The epistolary novel is narrated, on the whole, by Lucretia. And while our heroine is certainly virtuous and beautiful, she is also realistic and insightful, equipped with wit and understanding that expose some of the absurdities of the social circle in which she moves.

Searching for traces of an anonymous serial novel is an always time-consuming task but my instinct was that this novel was written by an author who would have kept writing and publishing. After weeks of periodically checking selections of text in various databases a result showed up through Googlebooks. And the result was surprising. The exact same section of the November 1785 installment, word for word, appeared in an 1815 novel by Jane West, Vicissitudes of Life; Exemplified in the Interesting Memoirs of a Young Lady, in a Series of Letters. The novel is mentioned on the Jane West entry on her Orlando page and is cited in The English Novel 1770-1829.[1] The 1815 novel, published anonymously and attributed to Jane West, was printed by J. McCreery in Fleet-Street.

It appears then, although further confirmation is required, that a young Jane West (1758-1852), wrote the novel and published it first as a serial in the Lady’s Magazine from 1783-1787 before publishing it in 1815 in volume form. Jane West, born in London as Jane Iliffe to parents John and Jane Iliffe,[2] moved to Norhamptonshire at age 11 and, according to The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, she was a prolific writer as a teenager.[3] Most of the information available on West is on the Orlando page, which notes that Jane married Thomas West and bore their first child in 1783, the year that the serial novel first began appearing in the Lady’s Magazine. If West was a prolific teenage writer, it is possible that Memoirs of a Young Lady was at least partially written before her marriage, although this is, of course, supposition only. Ten years later West published with the Minerva Press The Advantages of Education, or, The History of Maria Williams. A Tale for Misses and their Mammas (1793) using the pseudonym ‘Prudentia Homespun’ – a pseudonym that does not appear in the Lady’s Magazine. Why West published Memoirs in 1815, and precisely how much of its 1815 content varies from that of its earlier, serialised form, is a subject I am still researching.

Yet even in the early stages of research, such finds are fascinating in the insights they offer us regarding the afterlives of the periodical’s fiction and its correspondents who would later become established writers. It corroborates our understanding of the magazine as medium through which emerging writers could reach a wide audience and view and respond to the reception of their work by the magazine’s readership.

Dr Jenny DiPlacidi

University of Kent

[1] Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling (eds), The English Novel 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), II: 422.

Happy new year from Jenny, Koenraad and me! I’m finding it hard to believe that it’s 2016 already and even harder to believe that the Lady’s MagazineProject is just 9 months from completion. The compilation and publication of our fully-annotated index to all of the text-based content of the first 48 years of the Lady’s Magazine‘s run is very much on track, thank goodness. But the fact that the end of September 2016 makes an appearance in the calendar I have just stuck on the wall by my desk at home has nonetheless prompted some audible drawing in of breath.

Therefore, and in the spirit of the season, we thought that our first post of the year should be a round-up of some of the highlights of the past 15 months, if only to remind us how far we have come.

Getting our ducks (aka Excel columns) in a row:

In many ways, the least exciting but also most contentious and important part of our work since the project began has been finalising the format and parameters of our index, which we will be making available for public use in September 2016. Establishing clear, consistent and a user-friendly layout and language to catalogue every one of the more than fourteen thousand text-publications in the magazine’s first print run – including data on their authors (names, ages, locations and sex where known), sources (for non-original items) and metadata for each article (keywords, modes and genres) – is absolutely vital if the index is to be the comprehensive search tool we want it to be. Arriving at these decisions is also much easier said than done, however.

Working with the magazine’s own eccentric (she says politely) indexing practices and having very incomplete data about some articles are only the smallest of these challenges and actually the easiest to overcome. Finding a vocabulary that is meaningful to us now, but sensitive to the time of the magazine’s publication, has been a much more perplexing conundrum. We have spent weeks discussing the merits and demerits of particular terms: What do you call an author who doesn’t claim to write a piece they send in to a magazine but might have written nonetheless? Is plagiarism a useful term to describe non-original items published without acknowledgement as being such in the magazine? What is the difference between a romance and a moral tale?

While these conundrums still produce some head-scratching and lively conversation over coffee and sometimes chocolates, we now have a stable set of terms and the layout of the Excel spreadsheet the data is in is fixed. Whether we publish it in that format or in something else is not 100 per cent certain after some potentially exciting developments in recent weeks. But that’s all up in the air for the moment. We’ll keep you posted, I promise.

Discoveries: or, how we lost years of lives on Ancestry:

When we haven’t been attempting to reconstruct an eighteenth-century coffee house in my office, we have been immersed in various archives and various online databases working on our respective strands of the project. I, for one, will freely admit to getting lost down several long, dark rabbit holes in the past year and a bit (and several years before the project even began) trying to identify authors of unsigned or pseudonymous contributors, or establish the network around the magazine’s publishers, the Robinsons. And then we entered the fascinating, labyrinthine world of genealogy websites and their uncanny ability to make 3 hours slip away in what feels like 8 minutes.

We have always been absolutely honest about the fact that our project is not the key to all of the magazine’s mythologies. We will provide as much information as we can on everything in the magazine from 1770 to 1818, but there will be sources that are taken from elsewhere we might not dissever the origins of, hidden relationships between readers, writers and publishers, and many, many authors’ identities will not be able to uncover.

But we have had many small victories, too – many of which we have already shared on the blog – and every one of them has been sweet. We’ve been delighted to construct biographies for some contributors, like the prolific and talented Elizabeth Yeames (sister of fellow contributor Catharine) and for whom I now have a file containing her baptismal record, her marriage certificate, her heartbreaking will and even a picture of her gravestone. We have been fascinated by courtships carried out in the magazine’s pages and the discovery of a manuscript autobiography of John Webb of Haverhill, whose work was a mainstay of the publication for many years. There is still more to tall you about and much more to discover over the next few months and every bit of information gleaned makes those lost hours absolutely worth it.

Talks and archives:

We have been surprised and thrilled that the project has generated so much public and academic interest since it began and even more surprised and thrilled to get so many opportunities to speak about it as individuals or as a team at Chawton House Library, in LA and Toronto and the Universities of Cardiff, Glasgow, Ghent, Kent, York and Trondheim. At every talk we learn something new and every time we have spoken about the project we have found out more about what people want and need it to be. Next stop for the project is the BSECS conference at Oxford later this week, where Jennie is talking about pseudonymity in the magazine, with Jenny and Koenraad heading to Dundee later in the year and all three of us to the University of East Anglia in May.

Making our own community:

As we’ve said on the blog before, one of the hallmarks of the magazine’s success was its creation of a community of reader-contributors who felt deeply invested in its contents. The biggest pleasure of this project has been the formation of a new community of people interested in the periodical’s history and the future research it might generate. This blog has a modest but loyal (thank you!) following and our followers on Twitter are incredibly generous in sharing their enthusiasm for and knowledge about the magazine and its diverse contents. The social media arm of the project has been its biggest revelation to me, opening up a conversation I used to just have in my own head about the magazine to the insights and vast knowledge bases of social and dress historians, novelists, genealogists, archivists, historical re-enacters and textile enthusiasts and needleworkers. The Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off – already underway, although there is still time to join in – is just one of many dimensions to the project I did not have the foresight to imagine when I first conceived of the project. I’m sure it’s just one of many surprises to come in the following months.

So, thanks again for all your support for us over the past year and I hope you stick with us for the next 9 months!